China

Trump or Not, the US is a Vastly Better Partner for Canada Than China

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent cordial sojourn to Washington, and his claim of a close relationship with Dr. Demento, leaves some hope that for a reconciliation between our two countries. This is a necessity for the United States, which needs its closest neighbour as an ally, but even more important for a Canada largely dependent on U.S. markets, tourists, and military power.

This is not an audacious or disrespectful statement. Throughout history smaller nations — in this case in terms of population and economy — have always tried to secure alliances with larger and more powerful ones. Sometimes it makes sense to gain leverage by feinting a possible shift in allegiances, but that does not sweep away strategic logic.

Simply put, Canada, whose economy has been a laggard in recent years, and already feels the impact of tariffs, has limited options about its long-term post-Trump future. Like other nations Canada will be forced to support one of two alliances, one anchored by the U.S. and the other by China, with strong ties to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

There are some who see a pro-China tilt as the path to Canada’s “independence.” Fortunately, Carney, however daft on some issues, recognizes China’s aspiration in the Arctic to constitute a leading “geopolitical threat” to the country’s prosperity and security. The Canadian military is already acting to monitor aggressive moves by China and its more trigger-happy sidekick, Russia.

In this tussle, Carney may hope that the EU or other countries could help, but in reality, only the U.S. has the wherewithal to resist Chinese encroachment. The binational alliance may be hard to endure under Trump, but ultimately the U.S. is a vastly superior choice. The once ultra green Carney suggesting the Keystone XL pipeline be resurrected demonstrates that we should be fated by geography to progress together.

Canada also may want to consider what to expect in a China-centric world. China’s historic strategy focuses not on establishing colonies but vassal states from which it can draw what it lacks, mainly raw materials, and customers for its increasingly sophisticated industrial machine. This is precisely why China has targeted Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, keeping them as suppliers of rare metals, copper, and foodstuffs.

In virtually no case does China try to lift up its client states to the status of competitors, as the U.S. did for Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. China knows what it wants. In terms of strategic materials — a major trade issue — China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American or Western competitors.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: World Economic Forum, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

China's Scramble for Africa

Joel Kotkin and Bheki Mahlobo — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The West is about to get its comeuppance – if it does not wake up. The balance of the world economy is shifting decisively to what was once seen as the Third World, a shift led by China and, to a lesser extent, India. It is a dynamic that China hopes to exploit in order to replace America as the new global rule-maker. One region in particular is at the centre of China’s economic and geopolitical plans: Africa.

The rise of Africa, which now has 11 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing economies, is only just beginning. And China’s strategy is clearly focussed on harvesting Africa’s growing wealth, while sidelining the US and the diminished former European powers. In 2023, the EU’s then foreign-affairs and security-policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned that, ‘Little by little, we are losing Africa’.

Africa’s importance begins with its unparalleled resource endowments, particularly in critical minerals. These are used to power everything from fighter jets to smartphones. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone controls over 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves – a critical mineral used in electric-vehicle batteries and jet engines. South Africa boasts over 80 per cent of global platinum and 70 per cent of the world’s chromium, minerals without which we couldn’t make jewellery, car exhausts or most industrial applications.

These strategic materials provide the foundation for modern technological civilisation, and China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American and other Western competitors. Beyond critical minerals, the continent also has substantial deposits of oil, natural gas, diamonds and gold. Nigeria and Angola are among the top 20 oil-producing nations, while Mozambique’s liquefied-natural-gas reserves promise to reshape global energy markets. China has invested heavily in all three countries. In recent years, it has also upped its investment in oil-rich Libya, a major producer once aligned with Europe.

African agriculture is also strategically important. With 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, Africa represents the world’s last major frontier for agricultural expansion. Perennially facing ‘food-security concerns’, China has recognised this potential, and is investing heavily in African agricultural infrastructure and securing long-term food-supply agreements. This will reduce China’s dependence on American agricultural exports while positioning itself as Africa’s primary food-security partner.

Most importantly, Africa is producing the one critical asset that the world economy needs most: people. While China’s population is projected to decline, falling to 1940s levels by 2100, Africa’s population is heading in the opposite direction. It is projected to double to 2.5 billion by 2050, with the median age remaining below 25 throughout this period. Critically, Africa is predicted to be home to 25 per cent of all working-age adults by 2050.

Given Africa’s vast resources, agricultural potential and population growth, one would think Western capitalists and their governments might be seeking to invest in Africa. But instead, the African economy has acquired a distinctly Chinese cast, with little competition from the West. Beijing’s approach to Africa represents the most comprehensive foreign-engagement strategy on the continent since European colonialism.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Bheki Mahlobo is an economist at Cronje Private Clients. He specialises in economic and financial markets research as well as political trend analysis.

Photo: President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Xi Jinping Co-Chair the China - Africa Leaders Round Table; GovernmentZA, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.

How China Co-opted the Green Movement

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests. Overall, the greens see China as “pivotal” in the global green-energy transition, as states Sustainability Magazine.

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university. The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Homepage photo: Fabrice Florin, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2025 Edition Released

Wendell Cox — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This annual report assesses housing affordability in 95 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States). The 2025 edition covers the third quarter of 2024.

Key Points

Ratings: The report uses a median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) to determine affordability.

Affordability Categories: Housing markets are rated from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on their median multiple (Table ES-1).

Geography: Housing markets are labor markets (which are also metropolitan areas or functional urban areas), largely defined by the “commuting shed.” Housing affordability comparisons can be made, (1) between housing markets (such as a comparison between Adelaide and Melbourne) or (2) over time within the same housing market (such as between years in Adelaide).

Variations within Nations: The report emphasizes that affordability often varies significantly between markets within the same country. National averages aren’t always representative.

Housing affordability in 2024 is summarized by nation in Table ES-2.

Details on housing affordability for all 95 markets, displayed by median multiple, are provided in Table 3 and by geography in Table 4 of the full report.

For the fifth year in a row, Pittsburgh (PA), in the United States, was the most affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability. This year the Pittsburgh median multiple was 3.2, which is moderately unaffordable.

The least affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability in 2024 was Hong Kong, with a median multiple of 14.4, followed by Sydney at 13.8, San Jose, at 12.1, Vancouver at 11.8, Los Angeles at 11.2, Adelaide at 10.9, Honolulu at 10.8, San Francisco at 10.0, Melbourne at 9.7, San Diego and 9.5, Brisbane at 9.3 and Greater London at 9.1. All of these markets are rated impossibly unaffordable.

Existential Threat to Middle-Income Households

Among high-income nations, middle-income homeownership was once widespread, with house prices aligned with incomes. Since the 1990s, however, prices have surged —especially in
markets governed by urban containment strategies early (e.g., San Francisco, Sydney, London)— with homes now costing 9–15 times household income.

This shift is linked to the international planning orthodoxy, which restricts urban expansion through greenbelts, urban growth boundaries (UGBs), rural zoning, and compact city policies. While intended to increase density and sustainability, these policies have severely limited land supply, raising land and housing costs and making housing unaffordable for the middle class.

Nearly all severely unaffordable housing markets follow the urban containment model. The resulting land scarcity inflates prices, particularly near UGBs. This pattern, rooted in the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, has spread virtually around the world.

Purpose of Urban Planning: Urban planning is meant to improve lives. As Jane Jacobs said: “If planning helps people, they ought to be better off as a result, not worse off.” Yet urban containment has made many people worse off, by virtue of its association with substantially worsened housing affordability.

Current planning approaches emphasize multifamily housing and other densification while restricting new detached homes at the fringe—strategies that helped create today’s crisis.

Counterurbanization: Middle-income households are increasingly leaving expensive markets for more affordable places—a trend especially visible in Canada and the U.S. These moves reflect long-term structural problems. People are “voting with their feet,” to obtain the housing denied them in markets with deteriorated housing affordability. Without major reform, this migration seems likely to continue.

Elaboration and sources are in the full report. Click here to read and download the full report.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Image and charts are from the report. Charts by the author; cover image for the report from the GPA Archive, Carol M. Highsmith collection and used under CC 2.0 License.

Chinese Influence Is Leaving California Dangerously Exposed

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction from the Trump administration. But it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the state’s increasingly dependent relationship with China.

For a generation, California’s political and economic elites have been eager to abase themselves for Chinese money. This started under Jerry Brown, who assiduously worked to maintain close ties, but his successor, Gavin Newsom, has gone further, welcoming links with groups controlled by the Communist Party.

Newsom, of course, was the first US Governor to visit China in four years. In 2023, the Governor went to Beijing to kiss the ring and explore “collaboration” with the Communist regime, pleading for statewide carveouts from China’s tariffs. Then a month later, Xi Jinping visited San Francisco, where Newsom and the rest of the state establishment gave him a standing ovation.

This royal treatment might seem odd considering how critical Newsom has been of other “dictators”. Over the last eight years, the California governor has repeatedly attacked Trump over his alleged threat to democracy. But he remains curiously silent on the world’s most powerful — and fascistic — authoritarian regime. To this day, the California Governor has continued to send fraternal missions to China, partnering with organisations controlled, like much of everything, by Communist Party operatives. Clearly, there are some double standards here.

Such subservience makes sense given an economic relationship that already resembles a classic colonial tie. China runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion.

This dependency may alarm some in Washington, but it conforms to the preferred style of many California progressives. Free trade plays to the state’s deindustrialisation and climate agendas, raising prices inexorably on California companies and households. Even during the Biden years, California greens opposed tariffs on Chinese EVs and some have sought to “take out” Tesla, the only EV-maker producing in the state.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor's office, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

We Must Not Take Our Eyes Off the True Threat — China

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

By his supreme idiocy, U.S. President Donald Trump has stirred up anti-American sentiment, but largely to the benefit of America’s archrival, China. Although Prime Minister Mark Carney is European in his manners and predilections, he is a charter member of the cadre of useful idiots who seem intent on imposing Chinese vassalage on Canada.

The Euro-centric economist has proposed that Canada strengthen ties with the European Union, but Europe is, for now, a spent force. Canada is more delectable for China. It has many of the raw materials that Beijing craves, with rising oil imports at the fore. Canada also has a large Chinese diaspora community, roughly 1.7-million people of Chinese descent, that Beijing seeks, with some success, to manipulate to its ends.

One would expect some Canadians to resist these trends but Carney epitomizes an establishment, including American corporations and Wall Street, that remain remarkably untroubled with Beijing’s stated aim of becoming a global economic superpower by 2049. So, while assaulting Trump for his trade policy, Canadian political leaders seem to be missing that the West’s greatest long-term challenge is the relentless Sinic mercantilism.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to appease China in order to “Trump-proof” and revive the country’s moribund economy seems more like the road to ever great irrelevancy, as is the case for much of Europe. China is trying to build a mega-embassy in London that will help it surveil and harass those who fled Communist rule for the assumed safety of Great Britain.

Trump may be a posturing maniac, but the China challenge is of a more considerable magnitude. China already dominates the industrial world; it now boasts roughly as many factory exports as the U.S., Japan and Germany combined. It is the world’s the world’s largest automobile market and the biggest steel producer. It is also investing heavily to take over the aerospace industry from leading companies like Bombardier, Boeing and Airbus.

Carney and other members of the elite cannot address these threats as long as they adhere to notions like “net zero,” an obsession of Carney and his fellow poobahs. For all his talk about building energy infrastructure, Carney’s green obsessions could instead lead Canada into a dependent relationship with solar and electric vehicle manufacturers based in China, a country that emits more greenhouse gasses than the U.S. and the EU combined.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Why Europe and America Need Each Other

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Whitehouse Archives, Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Flickr, Government work, Public Domain.

China Runs the Table

Robert Bryce — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

On Monday, the Biden administration issued new restrictions on the export of key semiconductor equipment and software to China. On Tuesday, China retaliated by banning the export to the US of three strategic elements — antimony, gallium, and germanium — that have multiple military and civilian uses. It is also restricted the export of graphite to the US.

The two countries are now locked in a trade war over key technologies and the strategic commodities used to fabricate everything from batteries to missile guidance systems. As two analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Security put it, “critical mineral security is now intrinsically linked to the escalating trade war.” The latest salvo in the trade war provides yet another reminder that the US has, for too long, ignored its strategic vulnerability to Chinese supply chains. If China is willing to cut off the flows of antimony, gallium, germanium, and graphite to the US, it could also ban, or reduce, the exports of other strategic metals, minerals, and magnets, and, in doing so, inflict significant damage to American industry and US security.

Three decades ago, the Chinese ruler Deng Xiaoping said, “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths. We must take full advantage of this resource.” Today, China has an effective monopoly on all of the rare earth elements and in particular, two heavy rare earths: dysprosium and terbium. It has also taken a mercantilist approach to a slew of strategic elements in the Periodic Table, including nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, and tellurium. In addition, it has a near-monopoly on the production of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which are used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and numerous consumer and military applications.

If you skipped chemistry class in high school, antimony (Sb) is one of many strategic elements in the Periodic Table, and China produces more of it than any other country. Antimony is used in lead-acid batteries to improve the strength and castability of the battery’s grids. Antimony is also critical in multiple military applications, including bullets, missiles, nuclear weapons, and night-vision goggles. On Friday, I talked to an executive at a major US manufacturer of automotive and industrial lead-acid batteries. (He asked me not to use his or his company’s name.) He said his company had secured supplies of antimony through mid-2025, but after that, “we don’t know.” He said Trump’s threat of tariffs on all Chinese goods and the looming shortage of antimony are giving him “a lot of sleepless nights.”

The executive said that prices for antimony have more than tripled over the past few weeks to $17 per pound. He said the US has taken antimony — which is considered a critical mineral by the Interior Department, along with rare earths, cobalt, and uranium — for granted for too long. The last major antimony mine in the US, the Stibnite Gold Mine in Idaho, was closed in the 1990s. Today, the US imports 100% of the antimony it needs from overseas suppliers, and China accounts for about half of that supply. Now that it has control over antimony and other key elements, the executive told me, China is “putting the screws to us.”

Can the US get unscrewed from China’s stranglehold on strategic metals and magnets? Let’s take a look.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: China has dominant positions in the global markets for numerous strategic elements, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, gallium, germanium, tellurium, antimony, and the rare earth elements.

The Middling Kingdom

Wang Feng — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

In July, on the 35th anniversary of World Population Day, the United Nations released a new report that reduced the world’s peak population prediction by 100 million – from 10.4 billion to 10.3 billion – and predicted that the Earth will reach that peak in 2084, two years earlier than previously thought. This is not the first time the U.N. has adjusted its forecast downward. In 2019, the organization projected a peak world population close to 11 billion, with growth extending into the 2100s.

A significant reason for the downsizing is China, which was not long ago the world’s most populous country. Two years ago, when China first reported that its population was beginning to decline, the U.N. projected that the country’s population could shrink by 45% by the year 2100, from today’s 1.4 billion to 771 million. Now the U.N. has cut its prediction for 2100 to 633 million. That difference of 138 million people is almost the size of Russia’s current population (144 million) and is larger than the current population of Japan (125 million).

The reduction can be attributed to the U.N.’s assumptions about the rate at which women in China are having children. For more than three decades now, China’s fertility rate has been below the replacement level of about two children per woman. When Beijing lifted its one-child policy in 2016, in place since 1980, the government hoped that fertility levels would rebound; instead, they have continued to decline. The government’s new pronatalist policy, which includes calling for couples to have three children, has had no discernable effect on birth rates. Instead, the fertility level has dipped to an ultralow rate of barely one child per woman. As a consequence, China now faces the daunting challenges that come with rapid population aging, such as a smaller young labor force and a growing elderly population. At the moment, about 15% of the Chinese population is 65 and older. That’s three times the size it was in 1990. In the next 25 years, this share is expected to double to 30%.

Hard choices

A smaller and older population will weigh on Chinese leaders as the challenges associated with such demographic shifts become increasingly pressing. How Beijing addresses these challenges will have far-reaching global geopolitical implications.

As Chinese health care and pension expenses rise alongside a rapidly swelling elderly population, the country’s leaders will have to make hard decisions – decisions they have mostly talked about in the past but avoided implementing. One example is China’s long delay in raising its official retirement ages (currently 60 for men and 55 for women), which were set half a century ago. As its population continues to age, the Chinese government will have no choice but to resort to raising taxes, curtailing benefits, or both. Leaders will also have to choose between funding pensions and medical expenses or increasing military and security spending. Over the past decade, spending on the former has increased faster.

These are hard constraints and hard choices. Failing to address them will threaten social stability and the government’s political legitimacy. When the government enforced a one-child policy, it implicitly promised to help with elderly support when the time came. That time has now arrived.

Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.

A Guggenheim Fellow 2024, Wang Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on global demographic change. He is also the author of China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath.

Photo: Yichang via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Western Nations Cripple Their Economies With Green Initiatives While China and Others Laugh

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

North America, with its vast resources, may be in a position to save the economies of the west. But governments on both sides of the border seem more concerned with green virtue signaling than actually finding a workable approach to carbon emissions that does not undermine our economies and ability to defend ourselves.

The prevailing notion, both in Ottawa and D.C., is that our countries should ignore our resources, and how best to use them, in order to fulfill a messianic vision of massive, rapid emissions reduction.

Canada’s proposed carbon tax, pushed through media at government expense, and zealously promoted by Mark Carney, who thinks mass decarbonization, as epitomized by Europe, provides the road map to prosperity, despite the continent’s consistent economic lethargy.

This approach has also poisoned politics as not all provinces are affected equally by the initiative. The institution of the carbon tax and other measures by government and through the relentless pressure of green non-profits, to get a 40 per cent emissions cut by 2030 may be the toast of investment bankers betting on cashing in on forced changes. But for taxpayers, the impact will vary by province. Fossil fuels account for five per cent of Canada’s overall GDP but four times as much in Calgary, Newfoundland and Labrador.

However, as much this appeals to academics and wealth pearl-clutchers in cities, it translates into higher prices than normal. As the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh suggested, it places unfair “burdens” on the working class, one reason for his opposition to the tax. Worse still, the biggest green targets of what climatistas label as “industrial carbon” could devastate those same NDP voters — blue collar workers in mining, like manufacturing, logistics and agriculture.

Canada does not need another way to slow its economy. One recent estimate suggests that the proposed $170 a ton proposal would slice 1.8 per cent from the country’s already anemic GDP and cost upwards of 185,000 net jobs. Even Liberals admit something close to a 1 per cent decline. Some may see these draconian attempts to wipe out fossil fuels as the Lord’s work, but on the ground level it seems closer to class warfare.

Trudeau and his supports insist these policies are critical for saving the planet. Yet, attempts to follow such approaches elsewhere have not ended well. In Europe, most obviously Germany, as well as California, the shift to “renewable energy” has led, as it usually does, to high prices that already are driving German industry off the continent. Although not nearly as well-endowed with energy as North America, the climate lobby in Europe makes sure to throttle anything, such as offshore oil in the UK — in pursuit of green puritanism.

There’s something delusional in many of these initiatives. A key mistake is the common green assertion that fossil fuels are becoming obsolete and should be wiped out for the benefit of fitting a new economy. Yet, in the real world, despite billions in subsidies for “green power,” fossil fuels still represent roughly four fifths of global energy generation, just as it did twenty years ago. This is after expenditures of over one trillion were spent on solar and wind. The West has been reducing per capita emissions for years, but this is utterly subsumed by growth in developing countries, notably China, which not only buys huge amounts of natural gas but continues to open new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate.

North Americans be forewarned that in imposing burdens on themselves, but not competitors, green governments are essentially guaranteeing their own decline. Already in the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years, with investment shifting to countries like China and India, which freely use coal and fossil fuels to keep costs down.

Britain’s path may give the starkest preview of the future Biden and Trudeau have in mind for us. Since 1990 the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP has dropped roughly 50 per cent along with several million jobs. This parallels a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while consumption has fallen by only one third. Three decades ago, a net energy exporter, the UK now increasingly depends on imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

The winner here is clearly China, a country that emits more GHG than all developed countries put together. Ironically, carbon reduction policies fit brilliantly into its strategy to use its coal and other fossil fuel energy to power their takeover of the “green economy.” China has placed itself in the catbird’s seat on renewable energy, including utter domination of solar panels and electric vehicles. China already produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined, and seeks to leverage its total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours. China also exercises effective control of the requisite rare earth minerals and the technologies used to process them.

As the west’s own overpriced EVs sit on lots, China plays us for utter fools as we undermine our own industrial economy. The forced march to EV will be particularly tough on the 125,000 who work in Canada’s car factories. Manufacturing and mining, much of it energy-related, represent, along with real estate, two of the country’s largest industries. Under the current circumstances, they are heading for a spectacular fall. Overall, the EV industry in the U.S. uses 30 per cent less domestic labor than traditional gasoline car manufacturing, and under current circumstances can only hope for some basic assembly work using Chinese components.

These policies will affect every industry and consumer as cars and things like heaters are all forced to electrify. Britain’s shift to EVs is projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, and its government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours. By 2050 in California, state consultants estimate total energy demand will skyrocket, by some estimates rising 60 to 90 per cent. Not surprisingly, the state will face “acute electricity shortages” over the coming decade, according to one recent analysis.

Rising demands for electricity for artificial intelligence seems likely to add to this burden. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days. These power-hungry operations are expected to grow from 4.5 per cent of energy demand to 10 per cent by 2035. Artificial intelligence and data center demand are leading to massive expansions in projected energy use around the world at a time of restricted supply. Google, renowned for its green virtue signaling, has boosted its own emissions by 50 per cent since 2019.

Ultimately, the oligarchs will likely get their juice from sources like decommissioned nuclear energy, while the average family will take the economic hit in order to fulfill the agenda pushed by the likes of Steve Jobs’ widow, Lauren, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr. These, and other oligarchic allies, are waging a sophisticated and well-financed media and institutional campaign to catastrophize the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.

Finally, there is the issue of security, particularly relevant in an age of declining western power. The new green mandates, if adopted, presage yet another force to further reduce the industrial prowess of western countries, while driving more industries to China, India, and other countries who produce their goods with dirtier fuels and develop resources with less environmental care. At the same time, third world countries, for the most part, are not embracing “net zero,” as it is totally infeasible for them and will likely resist western lectures on climate policy.

All of this is occurring as a concert of ugly energy producers — Russia, Iran, and Venezuela — press their advantage on western countries. They stand to benefit from continued de-industrialization as one way to further weaken the military capacity of the west. Taking away North American liquified natural gas from Europe simply makes the continent more dependent on such malefactors as Qatar, a primary backer of terrorists and their supporters, and may lead the west, hat in hand, to beg from even worse regimes, like Russia and Iran.

The good news — while green virtue-signaling may appeal to Trudeau, Biden, and Harris — these policies could be impacted by political realities. Worried about voters in industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harris, even as she embraces environmental bromides, has backed away from EV mandates and opposition to fracking, albeit with dubious credibility. Yet, perhaps she realizes, or those around her do, that these policies do not sell well compared to promoting more affordable and reliable energy. Trudeau, if he wants to remain relevant, may similarly need to flip the script if he hopes to forestall an utter political defeat.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: Huang Dan via Wikimedia under CC 1.0 License.